Transcript

Robyn Williams: To end the year: a poet. Mark Tredinnick lives south of Sydney and has won any number of prizes, the Blake, the Newcastle, and most recently The Cardiff International Prize for poetry for a work about Margaret river. His latest book is called Australia’s Wild Weather - full of dramatic pictures and sublime sentences. Here he reflects on this often tempestuous continent.

Mark Tredinnick: Thinking globally, acting locally. Weather starts a long way out and a long way back. Weather starts with the sun and it never stops. But weather manifests locally. It becomes the conditions one walks out into night and day, the heat or the cold, the blustery wind or the stillness, the drought or cold, the aridity or humidity, the high cloud or the low, the cyclone or the heatwave, the sea breeze or the land breeze, the valley or the katabatic scarp wind, the snow or frost or sleet or hail. Because of the way those large animals, the cells of high or low pressured air spinning clockwise or anticlockwise adapt to where they find themselves - at just this latitude and longitude, at just this altitude, at just this moment in time. The weather is how the sky behaves when it turns up at your place.

In turn, the local manifestations of weather adapt us, construct the way we live our lives and speak our truths and see our world. The weather of where we are is a large part of the weather of who we are.

The winds of the earth. We have weather because the earth is round, more or less, and because it spins and because the heat of the sun, filtered and transubstantiated by the layers of the atmosphere, bears down on this oblate spheroid unevenly - more strongly at the equator than at the poles. Weather to a very large extent, is the eddies of air, continents of alternating and intergrading high and low pressure that circle the earth in their infinite variation, but unvarying succession; and it is what happens on the ground because of how those masses of moving air are constituted and how they behave, the winds they generate, the rain they drop, or not, or the hail or the lightning.

The geography of the sky. Weather has dimension and topography. It is country, like the ground, incredibly febrile and plastic country it must be said and clouds and storms apart, often invisible. The sky is a restless geomorphology of air; it is a transparent geology on fast forward. The weather chart maps it in snap shots, the same way a topographical map charts the slower rhythms of the land. Change the time scale, remember that continents too, travel the earth’s surface, that mountains rise and fall, that erosion turns an upland into a chasm over the years and you have the same kind of thing, in heaven as on earth.

Inside the temperate greenhouse, where the weather grows. And all this weather, the work of the sun’s energy and the earth’s response to it, operates the way it does - this updrafting and downdrafting, this eddying clockwise and anticlockwise, this troughing and ridging and pooling and fronting, this blowing hard and falling still, this spiking and plunging of temperature - because there’s an atmosphere wrapping the earth and it’s composed of gases in a mix that both invites and perpetuates this kind of thing. The atmosphere mediates the sun’s influence, letting enough heat in, but not too much; letting enough heat out, but not too much. And by reason of its vertical structure and its chemical makeup, it choreographs the three dimensional dance of air, the embodied, invisible physics that is earth’s weather regime. And for all the turbulence the weather story seems to tell our weather’s pretty placid. Wild is a relative concept in the universe; there’s a wide band of normal out there and we’re right down the mild end of it. On Jupiter there’s a storm more violent than anything we can begin to imagine and it’s been going on for 400 years. Now that’d be a storm. On Neptune winds on an ordinary day travel at 1200 mph.

Our atmosphere is a greenhouse in which the weather grows. The bands of unsubstantial stuff that wrap the earth - the troposphere, in which the temperature decreases with altitude and in which most of what we know as the weather and nearly all the clouds that articulate and perform it occur; the stratosphere in which temperature increases with altitude, the mesosphere in which again, temperatures drop with altitude, the thermosphere and the exosphere, the thick interface with outer space which reaches up to 10,000 kilometres out. The atmosphere conspires, like a complex curvilinear sheath of laminated virtual glass 10,000 kilometres thick to keep enough of the sun’s intemperate radiation out and enough of the earth’s reciprocal radiation in, to incite and moderate the kind of weather patterns life depends upon and to maintain a liveable band of temperature.

Weather which is to say the lower atmosphere has a chemistry and our lives depend on it. Most of it is nitrogen 78% and oxygen 21%. That leaves only 1% for the rest of the gases but they make all the difference. The temperate turbulence of the weather our lives depend upon depends, in turn, on the water vapour which varies from zero to 2% and carbon dioxide .035% mixed into the atmosphere, in particular in the weather zone below the troposphere. These gases and a few others, in particular methane, are the thermostat in the weather system. They govern how much of the earth’s radiation, the infrared radiation it gives off in response to its warming under the sun is retained and recycled in the weather system and how much is given off into space.

When the weather changes its mind about us. The greenhouse gases vary over time and as a consequence earth’s climate hasn’t always been the same. It’s been much colder and it’s been at times a little hotter and wetter. There have been several ice ages and, in fact, we are in one. At its height though 18,000 years ago, sheets of ice covered one third of the earth, they cover only 11% now. Earth’s mean temperature then was 9°C. It is 15°C now and rising.

We know that levels of carbon dioxide and methane co-vary with temperatures; when the earth cools CO2 levels are down; when it warms they’re up. There are exceptions but this is the general rule. We know that the earth is currently warming and we know that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have risen dramatically since the industrial revolution and continue to rise, and we know that you have to go back 650,000 years to find a time when there was as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is now.

The worry is not just that things will warm up a bit but that because of the change in the chemistry of the weather, the rising temperatures that follow and the exaggerated greenhouse effect that will ensue, the weather will turn violent. The fear is that the weather will move outside the band of normal instability and turbulence in which it’s operated just about forever and life may get close to unliveable for most of us. The weather, which for all its moodiness is mild – will turn wild. Not to mention the inevitable downstream effects of straight warming; deeper and wider and more frequent droughts; fiercer bushfires; rising sea levels, the inundation of low lying areas such as Manhattan, London, Circular Quay and half of Bangladesh, and the drying up of glacier fed river systems such as the Mekong Valley, as glaciers and sea ice melt.

Climate has always changed, but it’s changing around us now like it may never have changed before. It’s hard to tell with weather. It is by nature so long and so variable. But the world is seeing bigger storms and cyclones very much more often than it did; south eastern Australia and other dry temperate parts of the world are getting bigger and hotter fires more often; the polar ice caps are receding and the glaciers are melting faster; flooding, such as that in Pakistan in 2010 and elsewhere under the influence of increasingly erratic and heavy handed monsoons and flooding in Sri Lanka, Brazil and Brisbane, such as we saw in January 2011 at the hands of an angry La Nina, flooding is happening on a scale we haven’t seen much, certainly as often before.

The cause of all this may not be carbon and we may not be the cause of the carbon, though both propositions seems absurd to me. But the weather is not what it was. Someone’s turned up the thermostat and the finger’s pointing at us. We’re all guessing what will happen and how bad it’s going to get. The wet are getting wetter and the dry are getting drier, but it’s already a lot more complicated than that. Awareness that the weather is changing radically around us induces in me not just a low-level, nagging fear, especially for my children and their generation, but also grief and shame.

It’s frightening to contemplate the havoc already at play and terrifying to think about how much worse it could all get and not merely for oneself. If one’s ethics extend beyond one’s self and even beyond the merely human realm, it’s chastening, it’s mortifying, to think that how you have lived your life, how you’ve fuelled your prosperity and ease, has induced a change in the weather the consequence of which could be, already is, massive species extinction including ultimately perhaps our own. We are already living through the sixth mass extinction event we know about in the history of the earth. Much of it is caused by how immoderately we have thrown our weight around, how many habitats we’ve rendered unliveable, how many food chains we’ve cut; but some of it also and most of it in the years ahead will be caused by the changing weather, much of which we seem to have caused too.

It’s fearful to think that the weather won’t stay liveable forever, maybe not even for too much longer, even though few of us in our current incarnations will be here to watch it fall apart. But there’s a grief that runs deeper than this. It may be sentimental but I feel it. Regardless of who’s to blame and the smart money’s on me and you, this beautiful organism, this, dare I say it, intelligent system the climate of the planet, has been compromised. Profoundly perhaps. The weather we have known the weather that gave rise to the vivid and teeming, immaculate world in which the human species evolved and all that it has dreamed and learned and lost and made is passing away. The weather of the Holocene is dying out; the weather of the Anthropocene is turning ugly. We have diminished the world that spawned and sustained and inspired us. Not excluding it seems the weather, our first and only home. And where will we be without it?

Robyn Williams: Where indeed. The poet Mark Tredinnick, winner this year of the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. His book Australia’s Wild Weather is published by The National Library of Australia.

crank :

Flash :

31 Dec 2012 1:53:17pm

We have ignored the signs for over 40 years, but anyone who thinks that 7 billion people (and growing) have no impact is in deep disillusionment or denial. As the following quote ascertains "The only people who think that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet are either madmen, or economists".

Time to wake up and act while we have a chance to turn things around - at least the carbon tax is a start, as are energy efficiency and renewable energy. Unfortunately the status quo is difficult to change (especially the fossil fuel industry with their well financed lobbyists and climate change deniers).

ardy :

10 Jan 2013 7:57:57am

Flash 2 separate ideas and not necessarily connected. We desperately need to lose about 3 billion people or have a radical plan to get back to 4 billion. This planet cannot support 7 billion top level predators without a major reset. Think rabbit populations.

Climate change is something different. See these 2 links one shows a simple graph of global temp from 1850-2006 and the other show sea level change. Neither is anything to panic about. The stories are hysteria on ideological steroids.

valerie yule :

31 Dec 2012 6:48:19pm

Poem for Mark Tredinnick

Nil desperandum! It’s no worse than grief, denial, guilt, remorse.

1. First cut your waste – and wasted tears.There’s tonnes to save from all our years.2. Be not Consumers nor Abusers,We’ll only be the whole world’s Users.3. We’ll choose our pleasures not to harmEnjoy the peace, the friends, the calm.4. Cooperation not competing Makes every profitable meeting.5. To solve our problems not single issuesbut linked together in interacting tissues.6. Our aim is prosperity, not to grow,No cancers in social or economic show.7. Not one of us has useless jobsOr makes a virtue of unearned bobs.

If we are doomd, it will not beThe fault of ours, but others’ treachery.- - - -This poem is a first draft you canMake much better when you scan.

Paul Overy :

07 Jan 2013 7:55:12pm

Scientists have a way with numbers and poets with words. This is the best non-scientific piece on climate change I have heard. It would be even better if each number were verified by a climate scientist, which I am not. Aren't current CO2 levels around 390, not 350? And isn't the 650,000 years reference actually unknown, but more likely millions of years? Both points are perhaps small, but better to have no numbers than incorrect numbers, for the sake of the argument. See http://youtu.be/H2mZyCblxS4 Still, a great piece of work.

ardy :

10 Jan 2013 8:08:34am

The stories are to scare and changeThe temperatures remain the same.There is no loss of Polar BearsSo why the tearing of all your hair?In a century the seas will rise,Not by metres but about 1 foot.Climate change can always be, exactly what they want it to be.Do not be mugged by governments greedyA better plan, go feed the needy.Two billion western governments spent.Thier scientists adjust, remove and bent.A hockey stick the end default.Any number in their programs hockey graph results.....